Abstract: My primary research examines the rhetorical frames used to motivated and justify acts of terrorism. One paper currently in progress (forming the first chapter of my dissertation) takes as its point of departure Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory of Terrorism (GSTT). Utilizing the historical case study of Al Qaeda to assess the theory, it finds that the critical weakness in GSTT is that it leaves the key concept of “subjective strain” under theorized, but also argues that this problem can be addressed by integrating insights from the framing literature. The framing construct developed by scholars studying social movements takes shared narratives of meaning as its point of departure for examining which mobilizations fail or succeed – a concept that allows us to bridge the gap between objective and subjective measures of strain. This need to better specify the characteristics of shared narratives that give rise to deviant acts of political violence in turn provides the rationale for another paper (currently under review at Terrorism and Political Violence and forming the second chapter of my dissertation) which proposes a novel framework for understanding pro-terrorism discourse. I argue that these narratives can be classified as moralistic,legalistic, defensive, imperialistic, and apocalyptic, where each of these master frames represents a cultural rationale for why it is legitimate to subject a given outgroup to acts of violence. These frames in turn interact and combine in complex ways in violent narratives and provide a basis for comparing discourse across militant movements with otherwise divergent ideological orientations.
Robert J. VandenBerg
Graduate Student
Department of Sociology
